Rome – Secretary of State Mike Pompeo rejected any suggestion that his call for Pope Francis’s support against Chinese human rights abuses has a partisan motive, in the face of clerical suggestions that he is trying to stoke support for President Trump’s reelection.
“That’s just crazy,” Pompeo said at press briefing hosted by Italian Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio, when asked how his work on religious freedom might affect the American election. “We’ve been working on improving the lives of the people of China the entire time this administration has been in office. We’ve been working on human rights issues in China the entire time I’ve been part of this administration.”
Pompeo, who attended a symposium on religious freedom hosted by the United States mission to the Holy See earlier Wednesday, has been lobbying the Vatican publicly to scrap an agreement with Beijing that pertains to the nomination of bishops. Vatican officials have made little effort to hide the pope’s dislike of such high-profile advice, which the pontiff’s allies implied is an effort to use the State Department as a tool of the president’s campaign.
“They’re looking for Donald Trump to get elected, and everything is based on that logic,” Honduran Cardinal Oscar Maradiaga, who is close with the pope, told Italian media this week. “In this sense, I don’t think they’re acting in the interests of Americans.”
Pompeo rejected such allegations on Wednesday. “Our policy has been all along to bring every actor who can benefit the people of China to take away the horrors of the authoritarian regime that the Chinese Communist Party is inflicting on people,” he said. “That was our mission set, and it will remain our mission set. It’s been since long before the election. It will remain so after the election.”
Vatican diplomats signaled their distaste for Pompeo’s op-ed on their negotiations with China, as one senior papal envoy said that it was “received critically,” while Pompeo’s counterpart at the Vatican expressed “surprise” that he would take the disagreement public when “a visit to Rome was already in the works.” Envoys were doubly surprised that he did so in First Things magazine, a U.S.-based conservative Catholic publication that they regard as an unfriendly outlet.
“The venue is also meaningful, where one publishes things,” Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican secretary of state, told reporters Wednesday. “We know that the interpretation doesn’t only come from the text, but also from the context. Already the venue already says something about the intention of those who wrote this article.”
Pompeo defended the op-ed as an appeal to the Vatican’s better angels. “I wrote that piece to honor the moral authority of the Catholic Church and its capacity to influence, and make things better for people all across the world,” he told reporters. “They have historically stood with oppressed peoples all across the world.”
The column is “consistent with long-standing administration policy with respect to what is taking place in Xinjiang,” Pompeo emphasized, referring to the region where Chinese officials have established mass detention camps for the repression of Uighur Muslims.
“We want every institution to use its authority . . . [to oppose] the greatest human rights violation ongoing in the world,” he said. “I happen to think that churches, and the Catholic Church included, have enormous capacity.”
